


I Did Not Die (And Yet I Lost Life's Breath)

by Kieron_ODuibhir



Series: Cirque de Triomphe [41]
Category: Batman (Comics), Batman - All Media Types, DCU
Genre: (but the victim has a healing factor), (so it's psychological aftermath), Aftermath of Torture, Constant Vigilance, Earth-3, F/M, Families of Choice, Family Feels, Gen, Identity Issues, Owlman is a monster, POV Female Character, Thomas Wayne Memorial Clinic, Trust Issues, Vigilantism, married people telepathy, team mom
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-16
Updated: 2015-07-16
Packaged: 2018-04-09 15:58:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,823
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4355246
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kieron_ODuibhir/pseuds/Kieron_ODuibhir
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They should probably have washed off some of the blood, before taking Jason to Leslie.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I Did Not Die (And Yet I Lost Life's Breath)

**Author's Note:**

> Of the stories in this series, this is one of the few that will make significantly less sense without having read the previous one. Feel free to read it anyway.
> 
> A bronze plaque is referenced below. It is canon. There is also a reference to hydrangeas. It is not. (Though I'm told Batman has been known to engage in ornate topiary when preoccupied.)
> 
> Title from Dante.

They should probably have washed off some of the blood, before taking Jason to Leslie.

A lot of it brushed off as it dried, especially when he'd gotten into clean clothes, nice soft fleecy things—Jokester had saved the Talon rags just in case Jason wanted to burn them later; he'd seemed to find it satisfying the first time—but he hadn't showered, or even washed his face. Everyone had been trickling back in in twos and threes from all the potential locations they _might_ have had to rescue their young Red Hood from, many of them fresh from beating up the unrelated or tangentially-related bad guys _they'd_ burst in on, and each of them had wanted to get a look at him and see him moving around and sane.

Jason, already tense, had started to give off telltale signs of feeling distinctly crowded, not to mention irritated by all the expressions of concern. Had rejected the idea of showering with a tense curtness that suggested, if you knew him well, that he wanted to wash that man's touch off, but couldn't bring himself to be that vulnerable yet. Harley was pretty sure he had already forgotten about the crusted blood.

She should have handed him a wet cloth or something to clean up with, but she hadn't thought of it. Too much in a hurry to get him seen by an _actual_ doctor, rather than someone like her or Jon Crane who'd gone to medical school for a psychiatry degree, and done a year each of their internships on internal medicine, and in Jon's case knew practically everything you could be taught and more you couldn't about neurochemistry, but had never really learned the ins and outs of things like tissue damage.

She trusted herself (and Strawman) for a fairly wide range of basic medicine at this point, or they wouldn't be running an unlicensed free clinic three days a week, but with Jason? When all the _obvious_ damage disappeared before you even got the chance to look? Oh, no. He needed an expert. And an MRI.

He hadn't wanted to go. If it hadn't been for J bringing up the dog bite to her shoulder, Jason probably would have put up more of a fight, and maybe even won, because balancing her worry that he might drop down dead against the thought of _forcing_ him to do anything, to go anywhere he felt unsafe, today of all days….

Well, she'd probably have worked around the problem by wheedling Leslie into coming to their safehouse to look him over. They were moving soon, anyway, and she trusted Leslie more than enough to let her know their address for a little while. Really, the bite was more a string of puncture wounds than a real _mauling_ , and since the dogs had been _trained_ to attack and there was no reason to suspect rabies, Harley wouldn't have bothered going to the clinic about it. Not when they had all the necessary supplies and she'd had her immunizations, and most of her friends and family could put in a good set of sutures at this point. But it got Jason moving, so she didn't protest. Just pulled on a hat and jacket and moved with him.

Earlier, right before they left home, Ella had grabbed Jason around the waist and held on until he promised to spend a whole day playing with her later, no matter what she wanted to play, and she'd considered that enough of a guarantee that he'd be back again to finally let go.

Harley wished her seven-year-old didn't understand so well about the fear that every time your loved ones left, they might not come home. She wished her sixteen-year-old didn't pet his baby sister's hair so gingerly, like he thought his own hands couldn't be trusted.

But Jason let Ella touch him, and Ella trusted him when he said he'd be back.

And now Jason stalked along between the two of them in their most normal clothes, he and J in identical red sweatshirts with the hoods pulled up, swigging away at a water bottle as he'd been doing pretty much continuously since they got him out. Every time she thought about the impossible mess of blood they'd found him in, her stomach turned over, and she had seen something dangerous in her husband's eyes, when Jason wasn't looking. Kept catching flickers of deep rage still, and J almost never stayed angry for long but she didn't think he'd really cool down this time until they stopped catching those shards of devastation in Jason's eyes, or he managed to make the Owl _hurt_. Part of her—the part that had the Hippocratic Oath woven into its marrow—was glad they hadn't managed to corner Wayne today. (Though part of her wasn't glad _at all_.)

Their boy was moving normally now, but that didn't mean he wasn't in pain. Even if he was in agony he might not consciously _notice_ ; his pain tolerance alone was all the proof Harley needed to consign Bruce Wayne to a dozen centuries in Hell, and he had a worrying knack for relegating things he considered unimportant to the bottom of his priority queue and leaving them there. Occasionally he even forgot food, though the rest of the time he took it deadly seriously.

His eyes were very far away, as they moved up the street, and in reaction Harley found herself becoming steadily more hyperalert: this child under her protection (it didn't matter what he'd done or that he was within two years of his majority, he was _so young_ in so many ways and _hers to care for_ ) had been hurt, badly hurt, and if _he_ wasn't reacting with the appropriate paranoia, somebody had to. She tried not to twitch. Jason would notice, and he probably didn't need any help being traumatized.

Unless he wasn't. Unless this had been _familiar,_ so much in keeping with the last three years of his life that it hadn't even registered as something that could cause a _new_ wave of trauma.

But no. Even if the torture itself somehow didn't faze him (and even if it weren't for the blatant horror of that gore-soaked dissection table, she unfortunately doubted that Owlman had such a bad estimation of his own methods as to be unable to inflict a level of pain to which he had not already inured his subject), she _knew_ Jason remembered his time as Talon with fear and pain and revulsion. And he had just found himself back in that madman's power, in the uniform he'd sworn he'd never wear again, bleeding. _Helpless._ His PTSD was going to be more easily triggered for a good long while, at the very _least_.

She wanted desperately to know whether he'd expected them to save him, but was afraid of the answer. In case it was _no._ In case it was _yes,_ but they'd taken so long he'd given up. He hadn't said anything about her calling him _my son._ Which could be rejection or awkwardness or having better things to worry about, or not thinking she meant it, or thinking it was so obvious they were family that the declaration was just garnish.

Probably not that last one.

They'd come, at least. They'd saved the day. They hadn't _failed._

She met J's eyes behind Jason's back, a speaking look, and now they were approaching the back of the clinic building. "Wait here," Harley said, and Jason didn't argue, or ask why. He just stopped. The only sign that he was paying attention to the world outside his head was that he made sure to get his back against a solid wall before falling into a waiting posture.

Harley peeled off, letting J stand guard. She circled the block, carefully, checking for surveillance or possible ambushes. Leslie's was a potentially obvious destination, after today. She wasn't giving the Owl evidence against the clinic, or walking her loved ones into a(nother) trap.

When she got back, Jason was still patiently staring into the distance, and she exchanged another look with her husband, lips pressed tight in worry. He let his lower lip catch on his teeth for a second, reciprocal concern, before smiling, all sun and reassurance. She smiled back, her face feeling stiff but her resolve spiking. That's right. They were the circus, they laughed in fear's face; they always had each other, and they never gave in. They'd gotten Red Hood out. You maybe couldn't say they'd _won_ this round, not with the price Jason had paid. But they hadn't lost, either. Because here he was.

As the three of them swung back into motion, the back of her hand and J's brushed together in the moment before their eyes unlocked, and that helped, too. Grounding human touch. If they were less exposed right now, they'd be holding hands.

Harley knew J didn't quite believe she thought he was beautiful, even after all these years—he didn't doubt her _love_ , but she knew he would always see it as existing _in spite of_ his face, and that simply wasn't true. She knew he wasn't what was classically considered good-looking, and that the effect of the scarring was at first blush rather grisly, but she _liked_ his face. Liked the brilliant contrast of red against white, coloring dramatic as an arrayed geisha, and the long clean lines of his bones, and his warm hazel-green eyes. Liked the laugh-lines at their corners, and the deeper crease on the left side of his nose because his wry smiles almost always hitched higher on that side. Long bright hair and a long pale throat and _hers._ Even the scars, after the first month or so she'd known him, had ceased to be an obstacle, and become simply part of _him._

She'd never give any member of her current family up for anything, but all the same she sometimes felt a strong nostalgia for those first few years after Arkham, when all either of them had really needed was each other. Wished life could be that simple again.

Or at the very least, she thought, glancing at Jason as she slid past him to take point once more and lead the way down the street to the back of the clinic, she wished she had a six-year-old's freedom to dismiss all concerns about abrogating people's bodily autonomy, and pull her boy into a hug so tight he squeaked.

She used her key on Leslie's back door, and let herself in. Jason followed her through it mechanically—and then stopped dead, just as the door clicked shut at their backs, as though a terrible realization had struck him, seconds too late.

Harley was torn (for an instant, as she turned at his sharp halt and got a look at him) between alarm at whatever was wrong and relief at the young man's sudden animation, even if it _was_ in the form of a new singing tension, and the wary glint of eyes deep in the red hood. "We're on Crime Alley, aren't we?" he hissed, as his shoulders came up and his hands curled into claws. "This is the _Thomas Wayne Memorial Clinic?_ "

"The _what?_ "

Harley hadn't actually told him their destination, only that they were going to see a doctor—his previous exam, the one to make sure his altered physiology was stable, had been done by some sort of government super-soldier expert Luthor had lured into his R&D department, who'd never seen his face for both of their safety. Not something they could arrange again on such short notice. He hadn't seemed interested when they set out, so she hadn't bothered specifying. (Just in case he balked in reaction to some detail of the plan, which was bad of her, she was aware, but if someone trusted you to decide things for them, sometimes it was better to just _do_ so.) How had he known?

Jon had come here, after they rescued him and a few times since, and Ella'd gotten her shots here a few months ago, and Leslie had done a tricky bullet extraction on Harvey in the spring, but Jason had never had reason to visit, not with Talon's healing. How did he recognize it by the back room? (Well, he _had_ lived in this neighborhood as a child, that part was easy to explain.) And…was that the clinic's actual name? Not that the previous generation of Waynes had an especially bad reputation, but the name hung in today's air like a curse.

"There used to be a plaque," J realized aloud, meeting her eyes over Jason's shoulder, almost none of his very visible worry at the hunched line of the boy's back coming through in his voice. "Somebody stole it—must be twelve, thirteen years ago. Before your time," he told Jason. "How—?"

"He has this place watched!" Jason spat, huddling inside his oversized hoodie where Harley knew, because she knew him, he had to have at least one weapon concealed. Probably a lot more than one, after a day like today. "It's the one charitable cause he donates to that isn't just a tax write-off! What are we doing here?"

" _He_ funds the clinic?" Harley found her own hands itching for a weapon to protect her family. _Everyone_ came here. Everyone who had nowhere else to go. Why would he pay for his own victims to be stitched back together? Were there…experiments?

"That doesn't make sense," J muttered. He'd fallen into defensive position facing the door they'd just come through, trusting Harley to cover the internal approaches. Though if a fight broke out Jason _would_ throw himself into the middle of it, recovering from hours of torture or not. "If this place is a trap…"

"It's not a trap."

The door that led to the exam rooms opened a second after that quiet statement, and Harley found herself face to face with Leslie Thompkins, the physician of Park Row. Found herself searching the familiar worry lines for some hint of whatever secret lurked under the steady generosity she'd unthinkingly relied on for most of a decade.

Found herself horribly aware that she'd hurried out of hiding without replenishing her depleted knockout gas supply, as if the streets were safe. As if they weren't being hunted. The tiny .22 revolver at the small of her back felt like wholly inadequate insurance, and her shoulder ached more fiercely as she tensed, her calves and the arches of her feet coiled to fly in any direction that proved necessary.

This place was supposed to be _safe._

Leslie's mouth tightened. "Harley," she said. "My clinic is not a trap. It's exactly what you thought it was."

"So what's Bruce Wayne's stake in it?" Harley shot back.

The old doctor's face pinched a little bit more. She was only in her fifties, but her hair had all gone grey long before Harley met her, and sometimes she seemed ancient. This was such a time, and half of the age was in the eyes. "It's the one thing he does to honor his father's memory."

'Memorial Clinic,' yes, but—there had to be something more to it. This was _Bruce Wayne_.

"He grows hydrangeas for his mother," Leslie added blandly.

Harley's stomach rolled. Maybe she should have felt something else, maybe just simple incredulity, but the idea of the monster she'd faced just hours ago, the creature that would tear a boy to shreds over and over again for the sake of its own bruised _pride_ , the thing that had enslaved and tortured _her son,_ the idea that he could go home and care about a _bush_ because his mother had liked it—it was unspeakable. Obscene.

Owlman had no _right_ to be human.

"What, _personally?_ " J drawled from behind. If he felt the same way, he was hiding it exceptionally well.

"I doubt it," Leslie replied, with the same dry unconcern. "Is that my patient behind you?" she asked Harley, who pulled her shoulders back for every millimeter of cool disdain she could muster, ignoring the pain that flared through the right one. Dammit. She was going to have to walk all the way home again before she got her stitches.

"No," she said. "I don't think so. We'd best be going."

She watched Leslie's old eyes, the sadness in them welling as she _accepted_ that, that rejection, because Doctor Thompkins was either too proud or too humble to fight for anyone's acceptance—maybe both. Accepted the fact of someone who'd come to her for help, walking away without it. The patient was fit to walk, after all, and she had far too many claims on her to fight for one more burden.

There was nothing _wrong_ about that, not really. Harley knew that. Leslie went beyond the dictates of her Oath every day. Accepting without argument that they no longer trusted her to treat them was _nothing,_ compared to the fear of blackest betrayal that had just sung through Harlequin's veins. And if it was giving up, a little, it was giving up with the weariness of having given her whole life to a hopeless cause, for no better reason than because it was a battle that had to be fought, however punishing the odds.

Harley had recognized that idealism in Leslie Thompkins years ago, when she was new to Gotham's underbelly, and in her own heart had taken the older woman as a mentor. She'd been in need of one. For justice and for love, she'd thrown herself into the abyss and hoped she'd learn to fly before she found the bottom, and if sometimes she wasn't sure whether she was really flying or if the chasm was just much, much deeper than she'd ever guessed—the wind rushed sweetly over the wings she'd built herself just the same, either way. And the company was the _best_.

But Leslie stood alone. She patched crazy vigilantes together with just a little more patience than she showed some of the _other_ idiots who came to her with the painful fruits of their own risk-taking, and turned a blind eye to the way a certain blonde volunteer had shadowed her like an intern for a year until a completely unlicensed free clinic opened up on the other end of the East Side, but she'd always stood apart, giving aid equally to all according to need, and never joining anything.

Standing apart, taking money from a demon. Fighting, but never believing she had a chance to win.

Behind her, Harley heard J lay his hand on the doorknob.

"Wait," said Jason, and must have lifted his head so Leslie could see under the hood to his blood-smeared face, because she went pale. Harley squinted between them, frustrated. Normally she _owned_ her shortness, refused to regret it any more than her eye color; it was part of her identity, and it was useful in some ways, but when people _looked straight over her head…_ hrm. "Why do you know that?" Jason asked, watching Leslie, and his voice was strange. "About the flowers?"

"Thomas Wayne was a good friend of mine." Leslie took a step toward them, eyes fixed on Jason, and Harley readied her last undrained gas canister to put her to sleep, just as she had the hyena hounds Jason had so worryingly seemed to see himself in. "Is that blood yours…?"

Jason snorted. "Yes." Hissed thoughtfully. "J? Harley? I think it's okay. He didn't really _do_ anything with this building. Just had me watch it sometimes."

"You…?" Leslie said slowly. Harley had seen this expression on her before, diagnosing a lump that they'd both known was breast cancer, on someone who could never pay for her own treatment.

"You sure you want to know?" Jason challenged.

The old woman heaved a sigh. "I have spent a long time carefully not knowing. I do not _know_ that my old friend's son is anything worse than a cutthroat businessman. By the same token, I do not _know_ that your caretakers stole twenty thousand dollars from him earlier this year."

"I helped," said Jason. Harley sighed. Jokester chuckled.

So did Leslie. "Come in, all of you. Let me see what's been done to you."

"That's a little bit of a tricky question," said J. "Jaybird? You okay with this?"

Jason hadn't taken his eyes of Leslie's face, but a twitch of a smirk moved the corner of his mouth. "Yeah. We're good."

Harley didn't try to stop Jason as he moved past her, pulling his hood back. If he was willing to trust…after the day he'd had, it was amazing he was willing to trust _anyone_ , willing to walk around outside, willing to do anything but hide in a dark hole. Harley was proud enough of him to burst, and she couldn't be the one to drag his bravery down with _her_ fear. Resolve as you might to watch Dr. Thompkins like a hawk, they still needed her. She'd had endless chances to betray them, over the years. Harley couldn't think of any reason not to have done so, that would go away just because now they _knew_ she had ties to Wayne.

Follow the money, was always a good investigative technique, but none of them had ever thought to question Leslie's integrity. So they'd never looked.

"So I'm fine, actually," Jason drawled, as he came into what would be Leslie's strike zone if she were the kind of person who conducted spontaneous physical assaults. "Harley got mauled, though."

"It's just a minor bite," Harley corrected. It would keep. "You first."

"You got dragged off your feet by a hyena. And the holes're _still there_." He turned to raise his eyebrows at her, leaving him even more open to Leslie, pointedly drawing a distinction between his 'possible remaining complications' and her 'definitely still injured.'

"You don't have to be so stoic, Harl, nobody's gonna think less of you," J threw in, fondly, but with the note that said another message underlay what he was saying, and when she glanced at him, he flicked his eyes toward Jason.

 _Go first_ , _show him it's safe_. Harley smacked herself mentally for not realizing. She was really off her game tonight. Jason might be the one who'd decided to stay, but he didn't _know_ Leslie, and the idea of letting a stranger touch him right now had to be appalling. No matter how much he trusted the two of them, or how brave he was.

A hug was not what he needed right now, no matter how much it was what _she_ wanted to give. But feeling like he was protecting her, and seeing evidence that Leslie was a real doctor he was right to trust—she could give him that. So she would.

Jason stood right beside her while she sat on the table in the exam room, watching closely even as J lounged near the door, the picture of unconcern, as though waiting for Leslie to make a false move, or trying to memorize everything she did for future reference, or both. (She should ask Jason to help in the clinic more often, Harley thought. He had good eyes, and good steady hands, and so long as he could bring himself to be around strangers, it would be good for him. To help in ways besides violence.)

He snorted self-righteously when Leslie started grumbling about the definition of _minor bite_ and how this was not it, and Harley was almost too busy gritting her teeth against the antiseptic swabs rotating carefully _inside_ the punctures to snort back.

"Okay," he said, when all the toothmarks had been cleaned out and taped shut, and in the case of the two largest, sutured. "My turn?"

"That was the idea," answered Leslie. Harley wondered how much she knew about Talons, and about Jason specifically. Was she close enough to Wayne to be in his confidences at all? Or was everything really guesswork?

"Would you like us to leave, sweetheart?" she asked Jason as she hopped down and got out of the way. Doubted it, but she had to give him the option. Doctor, privacy. It was a right.

Jason blinked, looked from her to J in his chair, deceptively lazy, shook his head, and stripped his sweatshirt and the black tee underneath off over his head in one sharp motion. "It's fine," he said, setting the ball of fabric aside.

The blood on his chest had mostly flaked and rubbed away—Harley wasn't sure Jason even _had_ clotting factors anymore; his injuries never lasted long enough to scab and the blood tests Luthor's people had done hadn't found any, though they hadn't looked terribly hard—but it lingered in flecks, and wherever it could find a crease. His navel had the dried remains of what seemed to have been a pool of the stuff.

And his skin was unmarked. Harley wrenched her eyes away before she could make him any more uncomfortable.

Looked, of course, at J, instinctively, and caught the rage flickering in his eyes. She folded her fingers carefully around her other hand, to stop herself from making a fist. Leaned her hip against her husband's shoulder, sharing strength.

They, too, were capable of unforgiveable things. Madness, paired with righteous wrath, and the sheer _fragility_ of the ordered pace of life. The world was so breakable, when you looked at it the right way.

"Can you describe the injuries?" Leslie asked. "I need to know where problem spots are likely to be."

Jason hesitated an instant longer, and then started to talk. He didn't look at either of his guardians as he spoke, and the only sign of distress she could detect was how his hoarseness grew as he went. That, and the circles he began to draw on his right palm with his left thumb, when he got to the part where Owlman _impaled_ _his hands with daggers._

Harley listened, because she owed it to him, and tried not to think about the frailty of the things people built—houses, and corporations, and alliances, and laws.

How easy it would be to tear Wayne's empire down around his ears, if you didn't worry who would burn with him. How easy it would be, to break something that could never ever be mended. Trusty Harvey had gone over that line, once, and he was always more than ready to provide reminder of why he had come back, of why he had let J stop him.

That was how it had to be: they had to stand anchor to one another. No matter how dark the world grew, it was still not okay to darken it.

They were the heroes, after all.

(She just wished saving Jason was really as simple as pulling him off that table. Wished, as she had been wishing all her life, that there was some way to make people be _okay_. But real healing took time. Took work. Left scars, no matter what.)

The teenager was not exactly relaxed, as Leslie performed her examination with exquisite care, but he didn't seem like he was forcing himself not to bolt or lash out, either, which was promising. He shivered when the stethoscope touched him, but that could have been a purely physical reaction, and not an expectation that the cold metal would slice through his chest wall in the next instant.

Could have.

"Well, I can't find anything _obviously_ wrong," Leslie concluded at last. "Which doesn't surprise me because Harley would have found it. At this point," she met Jason's eyes for this, "I really have to give an X-ray and an MRI."

"If you think you're up to it," Harley forced herself to interject, because she _really really wanted_ to be sure nothing had healed wrong in a way that was going to leave him dropping dead in a week, and that there were no foreign objects tucked in among his organs, and that he was _okay._

"You have an _MRI_ machine?" Jason asked, and considering they'd found him strapped to a dissection table Harley could see this being a problem, but he grinned. " _Bruce Wayne_ paid for the MRI machine you're going to use to make sure my insides are all lined up straight?"

"Both true," Leslie answered, dryly.

"Well," Jason said, with a roll of his shoulders that seemed to shed tension like water, "how can I say no to that?"

He looked at Jokester and Harlequin again, and they smiled, and meant it, because as awful as today had been, they had Red Hood back, and there was life in his eyes. He wasn't okay. Not yet. No one could or should be, so quickly. But he was moving forward. He wasn't letting this experience control him, or tie him down.

He was—always, implicitly, _absolutely_ —free.

**Author's Note:**

> Okay, so describing Jokester from Harley's perspective? Mind screw. _He still looks almost exactly like the Joker bleargh no ugh._ Anyway. She thinks he's hot. That's canon. And everyone has their own point of view.
> 
> In the US, all psychiatrists must do a year of their residency after med school either in pediatrics or internal medicine. Harley likes kids but for purposes of being taken seriously in her field (abnormal psych) as a cute little woman, she chose to avoid getting pediatrics anywhere near her CV. So she and Jon were both internalist interns. ANYK.
> 
> When this story was first requested after 'Hell's Heart' posted, I was like 'why would you ever take a Talon to the doctor?' Which made me realize that I was getting just as complacent as Jason about their healing factor, and that is _not a good thing._ I may have taken one of the most absurdly overpowered healing factors in the DCU (that one Talon in the Night of Owls _grew back his goddamn head _) and tweaked it to be less outrageously strong and have fewer creepy side effects, but nobody even knows how it works. Harley is totally right to fret.__
> 
> __And that's leaving aside the psychological benefits of going through the ritual of medical treatment after trauma like Jason's had. It codes the suffering as a valid experience with meaningful aftermath, encouraging Jason to experience what happened instead of feeling he has to repress it all, since there's no physical sign of injury so he's 'not hurt.'_ _


End file.
